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Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

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Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#241

Post by jcadam »

fasthands9 wrote: post #134
RyanCavanaugh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RCV-IRV doesn't encourage moderate candidates because, in a polarized environment, moderate candidates are much more likely to be no one's first choice and get eliminated as a result. This isn't hypothetical -- you can look at the results in Seattle's City Attorney race, which strangely ended up electing a Republican to a citywide office for the first time in 20 years, and where the outcome under RCV would have been…

That is interesting but I don't know if that's always true. In Alaska, its pretty clear that Senator Murkowski, who was always somewhat moderate, has really leaned into being even more moderate since RCV was introduced there. Presumably, she knows that she will face little penalty for rebuffing Trump or McConnell on the issues they have for which the right position is unpopular - since there isn't much of a chance of…

Murkowski would have been eliminated in the GOP primary this year under the traditional system. Most republicans here in AK despise her. Whether she could pull off another highly questionable win in the general via write-in ballots is doubtful. McConnell has thrown his support behind her, rather than the candidate with far more republican support within the state, because of course he has.

Murkowski probably wins with RCV. The one D on the ballot, Chesbro, is a placeholder nobody expects to win, but her voters will surely rank Murkowski #2.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#242

Post by godelski »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #210
godelski wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much easier to understand from the voter perspective of the tallier perspective? From the voter perspective I find them fairly equivalent and both are frequently used in the everyday world (scoring might be even more considering 5 star reviews). But from a tallying perspective I think it is very hard to argue that RCV is substantially easier. Again, the score/approval algorithm is identical to the FPTP algorithm (whi…

With STAR, it's harder to understand the affect of your vote. RCV means: "I'd like this candidate, but if he can't win, I'll take this candidate instead." (And so on down the list of candidates.) Most people understand the concept of runoff elections. And, it's very very obvious that adding second and third choice candidates will never make your first choice less likely to win (on your individual ballot). Under STAR,…

I think you're over complicating it in your head and that's making it difficult for you to see. You need a different perspective. Instead the perspective you need is that you rate each of the candidates and then put that into the system. The system will look at all the ratings and determine which has the highest agreeability as a whole. If you're too focused on your own individual "should" then maybe this is hard. You'll over think how you should play the strategy and game the system to make your preference dominate. But the entire point of cardinal systems is to take this out because we don't want people gaming the system. We just want to find people's preferences and elect candidates that are most representative of the people.

You're having a hard time figuring out "the effect of your vote" because the entire point is for you to not be able to game the system. Obviously no system is immune to strategies and there very much are some here. But they don't have huge effects on the whole election. I mean we don't want to violate the monotonicity criteria.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#243

Post by godelski »

defrost wrote: post #168
elihu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with RCV is there's a big difference between giving an honest opinion and voting tactically. In RCV it's safe to put your first choice first if either they're an overwhelming favorite to win, or they're so weak they're sure to get eliminated right away. If it's a close three-way election, you might cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them first. It's hard to develop any kind of intuition arou…

> I think in the long run voters tend to learn that voting for third parties isn't safe, so two parties continue to dominate. The empiricval evidence in countries with long term ranked voting (Australia, say) is that bicameral party systems ( only Democrats or Republicans have any realistic chance) wither and die, and smaller blocs have a better chance of survival and impact | influence in the House and Senate .. Two…

I think comparing the US to others is often a bad comparison. Most others have coalitions and you'll find that two coalitions dominate. In the US parties act as coalitions. We can see the wide range in opinions from people like Warren/Sanders/AOC compared to those like Pelosi/Biden/Harris. Even in the Republican side you have this massive division, though they've been more effective lately at achieving a party over principle strategy. So two coalitions isn't really any better than what's here in the US because it is in essence the same thing.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#244

Post by wizofaus »

godelski wrote: post #175
wizofaus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell RCV is equivalent to what we've been using in Australia since federation to elect lower house candidates (we call it prefential voting and use it at all levels of government). I'm curious in what case "increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning"? I skimmed the link to the article you referenced and it appears that there were two republican candidates…

> "increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning" This is referring to the monotonicity criterion[0]. The page has both toy examples and real world ones. It includes some hints about possible violations in Australia, but your voting system isn't very transparent so it is difficult to audit these situations. As for vote splitting, I think it would be better to look at Favori…

Sure, thanks, I can see how it can happen now, and actually it revealed my understanding of preferential voting wasn't entirely correct. As for "favorite betrayal criterion" - I actually think it's a feature of preferential voting that I actually take advantage of, whereby I vote [1] for a minor candidate who has policies I agree with but I accept is not in a realistic position to govern effectively (due to lack of experience/resources etc.), but [2] for the party that I'm happy to actually win, providing they're aware they're relying on 2nd preference votes from another party that they can't just ignore.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#245

Post by godelski »

TimPC wrote: post #108
godelski wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think normal people can understand: "Rate this candidate from 0 to 5 stars?" If so, we really need to rethink a lot of how we ask for people's opinions, because this is probably the most common way.

The problem is not understanding how to rate a candidate but understanding what the ratings will accomplish and what voting strategy should be used to get your intended outcome.

If you're looking to game the system, the the point is to make this hard. The entire point is that we're trying to understand your preference in candidates. That's all that needs to be understood. Moving your preferences around slightly has little effect on purpose. If it had large effects, like RCV has, it would violate the monotonicity criteria and make it likely for the favorite betrayer criteria to fail. Both criteria that RCV fails btw and I think most people care about these criteria a lot, even if they don't fully understand them.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#246

Post by aragilar »

uoaei wrote: post #165
NickM wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes I mean, I realize this is somewhat subjective, but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me. I'm not saying approval voting is perfect either, sure it has flaws, but at least it doesn't violate the monotonicity criterion (or a variety of other important criteria that RCV fails to satisfy).

I think this is the important point: some criteria are more important than others in that the societal reactions when one or another criterion is violated are not equal and could engender different outcomes. If approval voting reduces to bullet voting in heated contests, I don't see that as very bad: to put it crudely, it's just the cost of doing business with that particular voting method, but there's nothing to say…

Do you have examples of 'RCV has real, provable problems that will (and have!) create social unrest"'?

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#247

Post by TedGetschman »

Any MaxVoting method which is any voting method where all voters can freely rate all candidates and all of that information is used to determine a winner (Approval, STAR, Majority Judgement, Division Free, Vote 321, etc.) pushes candidates toward the majority opinion platform, the single political platform that best represents that group of voters at that time.

Min voting methods which is any voting method that forces voters to pick only one candidate (plurality, ranked choice voting) favors either the left or right political power position, traditionally held by Republicans and Democrats.

Alaska's special election resulted in a race between a Democrat and a Republican where the winner received about 50% of the vote. How did that change anything?

RCV is just plurality with a 50% threshold. San Francisco had that until it switched to RCV so it could stop paying for the live run offs.

For ending division, MaxVoting methods--any MaxVoting method--will work. It should be up to the people of that area which one they want instead of being imposed from the outside by experts. CommonSenseforUnitingAmerica.org

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#248

Post by lostdog »

LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #239
lostdog wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One can vote Bernie honestly but also approve of Hillary as a safety. No, that's the thing. Many people want to express their preference, and really really didn't want to "approve" of these two people at the same level. It's exactly the same with... > Bernie was quite popular and frankly a lot of people that also voted Trump also liked Bernie because he was an outsider. ...where these people may have felt positivel…

It's an iterated event, voters would learn that voting a single candidate generally gives them less influence.

Millions of Jill Stein voters would disagree with that.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#249

Post by dragonwriter »

bhauer wrote: post #32

Ranking the voting systems: STAR Voting > Approval Voting > Ranked Choice Voting > Plurality ("pick only one") voting. Ranked Choice Voting is marginally better than plurality voting, but it has problems. The chief defect with Ranked Choice Voting is its non-monotonicity, whereby increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning. This may be what happened in Alaska [1]. STAR Vo…

> Ranking the voting systems: STAR Voting > Approval Voting > Ranked Choice Voting > Plurality (“pick only one”) voting.

I’m going to disagree. For essentially single-winner, public, candidate, secret ballot elections:

Any Condorcet method* > Bucklin Voting* (without limited # of ranks) > Instant Runoff Voting* > Majority-Runoff** > Plurality Voting** > Approval***, Score***, or STAR*** Voting (or any other *** system)

For public, secret ballot, legislative elections:

Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) using PR-STV* + Party List for leveling) > MMP using any single-member district system + Party List for leveling > Single Transferrable Vote (PR-STV)* > Party List PR (optionally, using STV to minimize wasted votes, but vote-for-one is close behind) > single-member districts with single winner systems in the order above (but, compared to the preceding proportional systems, all are close enough as to make no real difference) > any system using some or all multimember constituencies (including staggered elections in the same district for multiple seats in the same body) not described earlier in this list.

For public, secret ballot, chief executive + designated successor elections:

The single winner methods, in the order above, modified to use ranked ballots if they don’t already, in two rounds where the first elects the chief executive, then that winner is eliminated from all ballots, then a second counting of the ballots is done to chose the designated successor > The single winner methods, in the order above, separately for each office > The single winner methods, i the order above, for slates of pairs of one candidate for each office > Plurality voting** in a two round system (with normal, vote-for-one ballots), where after a chief is chosen on the first round, the successor is chosen by eliminating all ballots for the prior winner and taking the highest remaining vote count.

(methods with * are ranked ballots methods, methods with ** are vote-for-one methods commonly in use in the US, methods with *** are either artificially limited-ranks or more-detail-than-ranks methods, which for candidate elections have no clear, unique honest mapping from actual preferences to ballot markings; they are very good when their particular system of ballot markings maps to something concrete – e.g., for approval for selecting group activities in non-secret-ballot elections where approving is a commitment to participate if that option is selected or disapproval forfeits the right to participate, or, for score voting, where chosen score maps to a commitment of resources in the event the scored item is chosen.)

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#250

Post by dragonwriter »

ClayShentrup wrote: post #220
crazygringo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RCVs many glaring problems But all the voting methods have glaring problems, and every method is going to result in people complaining after their preferred candidate loses but would have won using another method. RCV isn't going to poison the well any more than other systems. STAR voting and approval voting, for example, open themselves up to the criticism that voting itself becomes a subjective process, which cou…

The normalization error, what you are calling subjectivity, is already accounted for in VSE calculations. Score voting methods like star voting and approval voting are objectively superior. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/

> The normalization error, what you are calling subjectivity, is already accounted for in VSE calculations.

I’d love to see an actual paper of the methodology of VSE (the FAQ is less complete than I would like, but helpful in that it shows lots of problems – for instance, while the brief description claims VSE tests elections with “voters who cluster on issues in a realistic way”, none of the descriptions of the different voter models mentions any tie to any empirical research on how voters actually cluster, instead it simply models three different, apparently chosen because of intuitive/aesthetic appeal, empirically ungrounded, abstract ideals); there are several dimensions of it which seems quite subjective/arbitrary rather than objective, making its conclusions also arbitrary, and, worse, it seems to simply ignore known effects like cultural differences in applying rating systems without concrete grounding (which effects both score-based and limited-ranks systems, but not particularly forced-preference or vote-for-one systems.)

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